Joint shaping and altering the demand profile by residential plug-in electric vehicles for forward and spot markets in smart grids

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) can significantly increase the elasticity of residential electricity demand. This elasticity can be employed to shape the daily aggregated electricity demand profile of a system comprised of a large number of residential PEVs´ users sharing one electricity retailer or an aggregator. In this paper, we propose a joint demand shaping and altering algorithm for managing vehicle-to-grid (V2G) enabled PEVs´ electricity assignments (charging and discharging) in order to diminish the overall electricity procurement costs for a retailer bidding to two-settlement electricity markets, i.e., a day-ahead (DA) and a real-time (RT) market. This approach is decentralized, scalable, fast converging and does not violate users´ privacy. Our simulations´ results demonstrate significant overall cost savings (up to 28%) for a retailer bidding to an operational electricity market by using our proposed algorithm. This mechanism becomes even more salient when the power system is integrating a large number of intermittent energy resources wherein RT demand altering is crucial due to more likely contingencies and hence more RT price fluctuations and even more so-called black swan events. Lower electricity procurement cost for a retailer finally makes it able to offer better deals to customers and expand its market capacity. This implies that customers can enjoy lower electricity bills as well.